What socialists say about school shootings
Oxford Area High School in Michigan recently re-opened for the first time after a devastating school shooting last year. It got me thinking about school shootings generally. They're terrifying and a uniquely American thing haunting my generation. I remember being in high school in 1999 when the Columbine shooting happened in Colorado. I had friends and acquaintances, mostly nerds of various kinds, who wore black trenchcoats to school. It was a goth-ish kind of thing. They stopped doing that. The fear of a student coming into the building with a gun and firing has since stuck around with the exponential increase of such shootings in the last thirty years.
Recent shootings have only gotten more intense. The rampage in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, for example, a small town right next door to where I grew up in Danbury, CT. My middle school math teacher's wife was the principal at that school. She was shot along with a large group of young kids. Unimaginable. And then the shooting in Parkland, Florida that killed a record number of high school students. The list goes on. When I taught at a community college in New York City, the security team showed us the footage of the Columbine shooting in its entirety as part of their training and just that experience of witnessing the video was scarring.
When I go to campus I often imagine a student opening fire, either outdoors or in a hallway, and think about what I would do in that situation. I try not to think like that too much but it's hard. Working in education, having been a teacher and now teaching teachers, I've developed a numbness to these events. What can you do other than read and talk about it and then try not to think about it? Something I've realized though is that I don't have a ready-to-hand socialist take on school shootings. What's the socialist position on this?
What socialists say
A search for socialism and school shooting yields a range of insights.
The socialist publication with the largest readership is Jacobin and two articles come up in a search for school shootings. One, pegged to the Parkland event, focused on the National Rifle Association as a mass organization. While liberal reactions point to politicians who take donations from the NRA as supporting gun violence, Benjamin Mckean focuses more on how it is that the NRA could boast over 5 million dues paying members, noting its racial strategies in particular. What makes the NRA so dangerous is that it has a mass base, something that left-liberal and socialist organizations do not have and should. (Notably, the NRA's head Wayne La Pierre blamed socialism for school violence.)
Another piece focuses on the relationship between the military and schools, specifically Junior ROTC programs that still in some places have shooting ranges at schools themselves. After a high school student committed a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, Jonah Walters noted that about 500,000 students are enrolled in such programs (like the one at the shooter's own school). Such close ties between the military and the school system encourages a systematic training and normalization of violence. In a society that suffers from school shootings like ours, we should end that partnership he says.
Socialists have also focused on student movement organizing around school shootings. The Parkland shooting, where 19 students died, marked a turning point in the national reaction. Students organized. They got fed up and began staging walkouts. Thousands of students took the streets around the country and demanded adult leaders actually do something. Socialist Alternative, a now-fractured Trotskyite group, reported on these walkouts and batted around the many threads of the issue from gun control, gun violence, and state violence. They articulate a mix of positions.
Liberation News, a publication from the Leninist-leaning Party for Socialism and Liberation, also focused on the student movements after Parkland providing more historical context for the 2nd amendment and the US's history of genocide and slavery. They lay out an 11-point platform on school shootings that includes statements like:
The socialist vision is to reduce and eliminate the violence to which millions are subjected on a daily basis and to end the exploitation, alienation, oppression, poverty and competition that fuel violence. Violence interruption, conflict resolution and social work programs must be fully funded as a national priority. Black, Native, Latino and other oppressed peoples must have the unconditional right to self-determination and self-defense. Lift the special legal protections for the arms industry. Ban the marketing and advertising of weapons, similar to the ban on cigarettes, and get corporate money out of politics. De-militarize the police and the state. Build strong and empowered working-class, youth and neighborhood organizations.
They conclude that "violence and the profit from it are baked into the U.S. capitalist system," so you have to fight that system to fight school shootings. That theme is present throughout socialist positions on the question. You can always count on the Worldwide Socialist Web Site (wsws.org) to cover the news of the day from its particular semi-Spartacist angle. In the wake of the Oxford shooting, Niles Niemuth notes that most coverage of such incidents does not consider the "deeper social and political structures" at play. After going into detail about the shooter's family's political and economic position, he cites the WSWS position in 1999 when reporting on Columbine:
Attention should be focused, rather, on the social warning signs, that is, the indications and indices of social and political dysfunction which create the climate that produces events like the Columbine HS massacre. Vital indicators of impending disaster might include: growing polarization between wealth and poverty; atomization of working people and the suppression of their class identity; the glorification of militarism and war; the absence of serious social commentary and political debate; the debased state of popular culture; the worship of the stock exchange; the unrestrained celebration of individual success and personal wealth; the denigration of the ideals of social progress and equality.
A Reddit thread on r/communism101 echoes this structural view of the situation. The top comment there
Kids don't start shooting people just because. It's indicative of large, structural problems and contradictions within a certain society. A symptom, not the illness, you can say. Therefore, the best way to deal with school shooting is to deal with the contradictions that give rise to it. (i.e. the presence of white supremacist groups, that are recruiting kids, mental health issues, income and other kinds of inequality etc)
Overall themes
After doing this little review, some patterns stand out. All the socialist takes I read zoom out from the narrow gun control debate and vague focus on mental health that crops up after school shootings. Socialists want structural changes that could reduce these shootings, focusing specifically on the entrenchment and power of the gun industry and the lack of public healthcare. Generally, they critique possessive individualism in its many iterations throughout the issues at play in school shootings. We might say, with Robert Albritton, that socialists want a more caring society. This emphasis on care at every level of society is a strong position to take in the debates.
As a coda, socialist do not come out fully against gun ownership necessarily, which reminds me of how Bernie Sanders was critiqued in his two presidential runs for not voting with the Democrats 100% of the time on every gun regulation they proposed. Like these socialist positions, Sanders talks about how his constituents own and use guns for a variety of reasons and he votes accordingly. Also we should note the existence of the Socialist Rifle Association, which has chapters throughout the country. Similarly, socialists recognize that guns are a deep feature of US society and they have to be approached thus on the terrain.
Recently, I heard an NPR report talking about an interesting angle on the Oxford High School shooting: while the school was closed, staff fixed the bullet holes in the walls and repainted hallways with soothing colors in advance of students coming back. These are surface details that call to mind the deeper forces that lead to a student goes into a school and starts shooting. Socialists try to get at these forces in their analyses and approaches to the problem.